Building a TS project & excluding certain directories

[cerulean mirage]

When I build my project, it's also trying to build files outside of ./src. In my tsconfig.json file, I have:

• "rootDir": "./src"
• "outDir": "./build"

I have a folder with some random files that I want it to ignore, but it's counting them as input files and giving me two errors:

1. Cannot write file '__' because it would overwrite input file.
2. File '__' is not under 'rootDir' '/src'. 'rootDir' is expected to contain all source files

Is there a way to only build the files located in ./src and ignore other directories?

[lethal sapphire]

you might be misconfiguring include

show your tsconfig > include/exclude/files

[cerulean mirage]

hmm I can't find those properties. Are they under a different name? Everything is default from npx tsc --init, with the exception of rootDir & outDir

[flint flint]

They're under the root of the tsconfig, not under compilerOptions.

[cerulean mirage]

Ah yea, it didn't generate that, and I forgot to add it. Not sure why it's not trying to generate files inside of node_modules though, since there's no exclude

Just using include will only compile those files listed?

[flint flint]

include is where it starts - anything imported by an included file is also compiled

From the exclude docs:

Important: exclude only changes which files are included as a result of the include setting. A file specified by exclude can still become part of your codebase due to an import statement in your code, a types inclusion, a /// <reference directive, or being specified in the files list.

It is not a mechanism that prevents a file from being included in the codebase - it simply changes what the include setting finds.

[cerulean mirage]

Having include will automatically blacklist anything not mentioned, correct? (unless it's imported through an included file)

Seems to work that way. ty both

!close

[flint flint]

No, it's just where TS starts.

[cerulean mirage]

I'm not sure what you mean by "where TS starts" o.O

[broken vine]

there is no "blacklisting"
"include" are the files to include in the compilation (and emit as JS)
"exclude" are the files to exlcude from the "include" (in case you used a glob pattern and want to exclude some individual files)

but yeah, just go look at the docs
it's very well explained and pretty simple to understand
https://www.typescriptlang.org/tsconfig/#include

[flint flint]

Yeah, if I "include": ["src/foo/**/*"] and src/foo/foo.ts imports ../../bar/bar.ts then TS will compile src/bar/bar.ts even though it wasn't in include.

And it would do that even if I had exclude: ["src/bar"]

Though if you have rootDir: "src/foo" then it'll error instead

[cerulean mirage]

Yea, I got that part, it's just the "where TS starts" that's throwing me

[flint flint]

I mean it's where TS starts looking for files to compile.